Open AccessTransparent free relatives in English
Author(s) -
Eun Sook Yoo
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2008.17
Subject(s) - endocentric and exocentric , phrase , predicate (mathematical logic) , sentence , computer science , natural language processing , dependency grammar , linguistics , artificial intelligence , dependency (uml) , noun phrase , philosophy , programming language , noun
Transparent free relatives (TFRs) are constituents involving aWH-gap dependency in which the phrase that is predicatedof the gap associated with 'what', not the wh-phraseitself, functions as the syntactic and semantic "nucleus."Previous analyses have either treated TFRs as a constructionradically different from ordinary FRs, utilizing such mechanismsas parenthetical placement or grafts, or assimilated them toordinary FRs, relying on abstract/empty head elements and a vaguesemantic relation holding between the gap and the predicatephrase. In this paper, we investigate how the puzzling propertiesof English TFRs can be accounted for in HPSG. The paper shows thatthe transparency effect of TRFs can be handled by featureinheritance from the nucleus predicate phrase, together with aconstructional constraint that deals with the exocentric propertyof TFRs.